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Mélodies persanes, Op 26

Recordings

'This is the most resounding blow yet to be struck for the mélodies of Saint-Saëns … Le Roux is one of the most charismatic performers of our tim ...'Musical jewels surface with delightful consistency in this 27-song recital. An absorbing and revelatory disc' (BBC Music Magazine)» More

When the beautiful girls of Zaboulistan dance,
They dance like kid goats stung by a cleg.
Their nails are coloured a delicate pink,
None but the Sultan may gaze on them.
In each hand they hold a ringing sistrum;
And the turbaned eunuch clenches his sabre.

But from the river where the lilies slumber,
The breeze starts up like a buccaneer.
Off he goes to bewitch their hearts and their lips,
Under the jealous man’s eyes, despite the law.
O dreamer, be proud! The breeze has mistaken
Your love-song for its talisman!

There are six songs in this cycle of settings of poems by Armand Renaud. Without denigrating them (at least one is a masterpiece) it is here that we realise what a fortune Saint-Saëns might have made if he had been a composer of film music in our own time. His stop-watch professionalism and ability to conjure atmosphere at the drop of a hat would have made him a dream candidate for Hollywood.The sultry dance in dotted rhythm which is La Brise is hypnotically repetitive and an antecedent to Ravel’s Bolero. It slinkily suggests the sort of music to which one surrenders in a haze of hashish.

Sabre en main gives us a glimpse of the warlike Saint-Saëns, the man who was to be so formidable a patriot during the First World War. In that part of his life he brandished his musical and literary fists at the enemy, and would have been willing to brandish a sabre given half a chance, for there is more sheer rage in Saint-Saëns’ personality (and sometimes in the music) than in almost any other composer one could name. Here he wreaks his revenge in Islamic guise. It is all a little over the top. The word ‘camp’ comes to mind (however unintentionally the composer invokes our smiles); Saint-Saëns appears here as Lawrence (or perhaps Florence) of Arabia in the flowing robes of the desert. It is difficult to think of another French composer who might have written this piano part (by the standards of accompaniments of the time, bristling with difficulties) which is pompously, almost ridiculously, grandiloquent as well as strangely stirring.

Au cimetière is one of Saint-Saëns’ experiments in a noble minimalism where the accompaniment strums minstrel-like in the background, and the song is carried, or almost carried, by the interest of the vocal line. This soulful plaint might have been sung by Rudolf Valentino in The Sheikh, for the public taste for this type of glamorised orientalism was to last at least another fìfty years.

Without so much as a pause,
I pirouette on my toe,
Spinning, spinning, spinning,
Like a withered leaf.
As at the moment of death,
The earth, the ocean and space
Pass before my clouded eyes,
Radiating the same light.
And as I rotate round and round,
I accelerate,
Devoid of pleasure as of anger,
Shivering despite my sweat.

In caves aflood with foaming waves,
Standing on inaccessible rocks,
Spinning, spinning, spinning
I’ve not the slightest fear of collision.
In the forests and along the coasts,
Surrounded by savage beasts
And their havoc-wreaking rivals,
Soldiers brandishing their swords,
In the centre of slave-markets,
On volcano slopes awash with lava,
In the land of Slavs and Mogols,
I spin and spin unflaggingly.

Adhering to laws that none can defer,
The laws that the sun obeys in its course,
Spinning, spinning, spinning,
My feet no longer touch the ground.
I soar aloft to the starry sky,
I flit right past the silent moon,
Past Jupiter and Saturn,
Whirring on my way.
And I shoot past Capricorn,
And plunge into the dismal abyss
Of absolute and boundless night,
Where I spin and spin eternally.

The last song in the cycle, Tournoiement, is without doubt the most interesting; indeed it is one of Saint-Saëns’ truly great songs. Whether or not he ever experienced the joys, or otherwise, of opium on his many travels, we shall probably never know, but the composer provides us with a dizzy ride through the firmament of drug-enhanced perception. It is a marvel that the weave of this magic carpet is so light that there is never a danger of suffocating the voice in the endless strands of silken semiquavers. The difïiculty of this, purely as a piano piece, is as good an indication as is to be found in the songs of the composer’s own keyboard virtuosity—fleet, agile, and able to paint minute detail with the delicacy and evenness of his touch. It is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine another French composer writing a mélodie like this, so abandoned and exotic at the same time as so classically restrained. Those who have taken drugs testify to a greater clarity of vision as a result of some of them, not the swirling uncertainties of alcoholic stupor. If this is so, Saint-Saëns has admirably conveyed this paradoxical clarity at the heart of his evocation.